The talented Anj Smith has breathed new life into painting over the course of the last decade. Known for her way with colour and her deft hand at replicating even the most minute of details, the London-based artist opened her latest exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in New York with a flourish this week - the works had already sold out.
'The Flowering of Phantoms' pays tribute to themes that have long prevailed in her work, such as gender, identity, evolution and the representation of the psychological space, to name a few. Produced over 18 months, each of the 11 pieces is small in scale; most of them are only slightly larger than A4.
The works range from desolate landscapes to haunting portraits and ethereal still-lifes. When the viewer gets up close, and one has no choice but to, each piece brims with impressive, painterly detail that harks back to the Dutch Golden Age.
Building on her earlier work, these paintings throw a stronger focus on colour and painting language. From thread-thin veins riddling subjects' faces to sheer swathes of chiffon and densely worked impasto that forms a rocky ossuary, every painted element of Smith's work exudes an otherworldly quality in celebration of the medium. The backgrounds alone are luminous bodies of crimson and pewter. In the portraits, there are often as many layers of paint as there are layers of skin.
'One of the main concepts of this show is painting as there is a slight snobbery in the art world towards [it],' Smith mused. 'Some institutions prefer to promote other types of art because they are seen as more contemporary. But [painting] facilitates everything for me, it's so liberating. You can paint time, gravity and all those things. The reason that it's still around is that there's just something so seductive about it.'
Although executed with the refinement and intricacy of a Flemish master, Smith's paintings are undoubtedly rooted in the modern day. She has inserted plenty of contemporary motifs, such as Vogue menthol cigarette butts ('The most glamorous ones to smoke,' she said, with a laugh) checkered Prada blouses and David Bowie-esque glasses. Their inclusion is far from trivial though; an Alexander McQueen knuckleduster ring festooned with skulls displaces the traditional symbol for death and mortality with a modern icon of wealth and luxury.
The true beauty of Smith's work is that each insular painting is backed by multiple tiers of carefully conceived symbolism. Every piece is a self-contained commentary on the state of the times. It's this inherent, diverging tension - which consistently appears throughout her oeuvre - that makes her work so compelling.
'The Revision of Systema Naturae', 2012. © Anj Smith. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
'New Blooms At The Ossuary', 2012. © Anj Smith. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
'High Blue Country', 2012. © Anj Smith. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
'The Sentry', 2012. © Anj Smith. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
'Night Out', 2012. © Anj Smith. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
'Youth', 2012. © Anj Smith. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
'Portrait of a Girl in Glass', 2012. © Anj Smith. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
'Chorus', 2012. © Anj Smith. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
'Ziggy', 2012. © Anj Smith. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
'Fruits of the Forest, 2012. © Anj Smith. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
ADDRESS
Hauser & Wirth New York
32 East 69th Street
NY 10021
-
Year in review: top 10 design stories of 2024Wallpaper* magazine's 10 most-read design stories of 2024 whisk us from fun Ikea pieces to the man who designed the Paris Olympics, and 50 years of the Rubik's Cube
-
Sharon Smith's Polaroids capture 1980s New York nightlifeIDEA Books has launched a new monograph of Smith’s photographs, titled Camera Girl and edited by former editor-in-chief of LIFE magazine, Bill Shapiro
-
A multifaceted Beverly Hills house puts the beauty of potentiality in the frameA Beverly Hills house in Trousdale, designed by Robin Donaldson, brings big ideas to the residential scale
-
Inside Luna Luna: the amusement park designed by artists lands in New York‘Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy’ – featuring rides by Basquiat, Lichtenstein, Hockney, Haring, and Dalí – has opened at The Shed
-
Henni Alftan’s paintings frame everyday moments in cinematic renditionsConcurrent exhibitions in New York and Shanghai celebrate the mesmerising mystery in Henni Alftan’s paintings
-
Brutalism in film: the beautiful house that forms the backdrop to The Room Next DoorThe Room Next Door's production designer discusses mood-boarding and scene-setting for a moving film about friendship, fragility and the final curtain
-
'There’s an anxiety under all of it': Violet Dennison in New YorkViolet Dennison debuts abstract paintings with new show 'Damaged Self' at Tara Downs Gallery
-
‘Gas Tank City’, a new monograph by Andrew Holmes, is a photorealist eye on the American West‘Gas Tank City’ chronicles the artist’s journey across truck-stop America, creating meticulous drawings of fleeting moments
-
Mark Armijo McKnight’s bodily landscapes capture the tactile serenity of the American WestThe artist’s new exhibition at the Whitney Museum, which is organised by the museum curator Drew Sawyer, offers a succinct window into his contemplative suggestion of queering a landscape
-
Dark, glamorous and hedonistic: a photography book captures New York in the 1990sNew York: High Life, Low Life, by Dafydd Jones, goes behind the scenes of New York society
-
Derrick Alexis Coard’s portraits are a sensitive, positive testimony to Black menThe late artist Derrick Alexis Coard’s retrospective ‘I Am That I Am’, at New York’s Salon 94, honours his ‘symbolic expression for possible change for the African-American male community’
